Tuesday, May 27, 2014

My laptop hard drive got inexplicably wiped, so my son installed W8.1. Being used to W7, there was a learning curve, but it wasn't too bad.

Then my hard drive inexplicably crashed again, so my son now put in a hard drive and reinstalled W8.1. However, he warned me that this drive isn't reliable.

Thankfully I'll be able to order one in a few days as soon as my Paypal transfer goes through. No, I'm not going to some computer store and paying an arm and a leg for something I can get online for a fraction of the price. Yes, it's new-other, which means a drive that was removed from a new, unused machine during an upgrade to a bigger drive. This one has a capacity of 320GB, plenty big enough for what I want it to do. The company is just selling it at a huge discount to get rid of it and make a little money. It will be shipped in an antistatic bag and bubble envelope. I discussed it with my son and he said as long as they deliver it like that it should be fine. So if the seller is still selling them in five days, I'm ordering. If not, I've transferred enough that I know I can get another one if it costs a bit more than the one I'm watching.

No, I'm not telling you which one I'm watching or where, you'll have to guess, can't make it easier for someone else to buy it out from under me.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Anyway, once everything got settled with a new (W8.1) OS, I installed my games, updated my video card and when I tried to play DA Origins, I got the error message that some components were missing which were related to my graphics card. Now those components were in the graphics card folder, but when I compared the dlls from DA2 to DAO, those components were missing from DAO. Now, what was I to do? I'm no computer expert, but since those particular dlls had to do with graphics and weren't game-specific, I got the brilliant idea to copy them over from one to the other. Now, not move them over, copy them over. This means that I had to right-click the dll I wanted, select copy from the popup menu and then right click in the other folder and choose paste. Of course I had to give admin permission for something like this since it's in the Program files, but that's just an extra click. Once I copied all the missing files over, DAO then launched as intended. Yay me.

Also, if you play Dragon Age on the computer, and you want to enable the console, please go into your settings (which are in the DA folder in Documents, not Program) and change the hotkey for the console to F6 instead of `(tilde). The reason for this is it is very easy to accidentally click that tilde key when using your quickbar 1 button. You simply need to go to your Bioware folder in Documents, find Dragon Age, then Settings, then the Keybindings,. Once it opens in Notepad, scroll down to OpenConsole: Button_GRAVE, delete GRAVE and replace it with F6 (or whatever you prefer) and then close the window, clicking Yes when it asks you if you want to save.